As the UN and Oxfam warn of the dangers ahead, expert analyst Lester Brown says time to solve the problem is running out…
A drying corn field in southern Minnesota. Bad weather has resulted in a poor harvest this year. Photograph: David I. Gross/ Corbis
Brandon Hunnicutt has had a year to remember. The young Nebraskan from Hamilton County farms 2,600 acres of the High Plains with his father and brother. What looked certain in an almost perfect May to be a “phenomenal” harvest of maize and soy beans has turned into a near disaster.
A three-month heatwave and drought with temperatures often well over 38C burned up his crops. He lost a third and was saved only by pumping irrigation water from the aquifer below his farm.
“From 1 July to 1 October we had 4ins of rain and long stretches when we didn’t have any. Folk in the east had nothing at all. They’ve been significantly hurt. We are left wondering whether the same will happen again,” he says.
On the other side of the world, Mary Banda, who lives in Mphaka village near Nambuma in Malawi, has had a year during which she has barely been able to feed her children, one of whom has just gone to hospital with malnutrition.
Government health worker Patrick Kamzitu says: “We are seeing more hunger among children. The price of maize has doubled in the last year. Families used to have one or two meals a day; now they are finding it hard to have one.”
Hunnicutt and Banda are linked by food. What she must pay for her maize is determined largely by how much farmers such as Brandon grow and export. This year the US maize harvest is down 15% and nearly 40% of what is left has gone to make vehicle fuel. The result is less food than usual on to the international market, high prices and people around the world suffering.
“This situation is not going to go away,” says Lester Brown, an environmental analyst and president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington. In a new book, Full Planet, Empty Plates, he predicts ever increasing food prices, leading to political instability, spreading hunger and, unless governments act, a catastrophic breakdown in food. “Food is the new oil and land is the new gold,” he says. “We saw early signs of the food system unravelling in 2008 following an abrupt doubling of world grain prices. As they climbed, exporting countries [such as Russia] began restricting exports to keep their domestic prices down. In response, importing countries panicked and turned to buying or leasing land in other countries to produce food for themselves.”
“The result is that a new geopolitics of food has emerged, where the competition for land and water is intensifying and each country is fending for itself.”
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The Economist “Authoritative weekly newspaper focusing on international politics and business news and opinion.”
The spine of a turtle is connected to its shell. Turtles generally have between 40 and 50 vertebrae. The ribs of the turtle develop with the costal plates of the carapace. As the turtle ages, the ribs fuse with plates of the shell. Turtles use the cervical vertebrae (eight bones of the neck), withdrawing them under the carapace to provide greater protection to the neck. – Provided by Reference.com
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This Is Not a Revolution
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Who invited YOU?! The moment a crocodile tries to crash a lion’s dinner party
Have you ever had a lovely dinner party ruined when an unwanted, uninvited dinner guest turns up?Well, these angry lions have – they were enjoying a delicious meal of antelope steak on the banks of a river in Zambia when, all of a sudden, a crocodile turned up and tried to sneak a bite to eat.The lions are captured with an all-too-human stunned look of surprise on their faces when they look up from their feast and find a crafty additional mouth at the table.
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NOC, the white whale that tried to sound like a human | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine
Listen to this recording.[at link below] It sounds like a drunkard playing a kazoo, but it’s actually the call of a beluga (a white whale) called NOC. Belugas don’t normally sound like that; instead, NOC’s handlers think that his bizarre sounds were an attempt at mimicking the sounds of human speech.
The idea isn’t far-fetched. Belugas are so vocal that they’re often called “sea canaries”. William Schevill and Barbara Lawrence – the first scientists to study beluga sounds in the wild – wrote that the calls would occasionally “suggest a crowd of children shouting in the distance”. Ever since, there have been many anecdotes that these animals could mimic human voices, including claims that Lagosi, a male beluga at Vancouver Aquarium, could speak his own name. But until now, no one had done the key experiment. No one had recorded a beluga doing its alleged human impression, and analysed the call’s acoustic features.
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Groundwater Extraction Linked to Lorca Quake
Scientists say a deadly earthquake in Spain last year was likely triggered by decades of groundwater extraction, which caused an 820-foot (250-meter) drop in the groundwater level of the Alto Guadalentin basin over the past half a century. The town of Lorca, where the 5.1-magnitude quake claimed the lives of nine people in May 2011, is located in a seismically active region. Researchers believe that the removal of groundwater placed stress on the nearby Alhama de Murcia Fault, leading to the earthquake.
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I doubt if the front would look any better than this read view.
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The New Oil and Gas Boom
In their second debate, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney began with a spirited discussion on energy, during which they both agreed on the goal of making America more energy independent. This has been part of presidential rhetoric since Richard Nixon declared energy independence his Administration’s aim. As it happens, regardless of who is elected President, a tidal shift is taking place in energy that will matter far more to America’s energy future than anything either candidate plans or imagines.
Over the past decade, America has experienced a technological revolution–not, as expected, in renewable energy but rather in the extraction of oil and gas. As a result, domestic supplies of new sources of energy–shale gas, oil from shale, tight sands and the deepwater, natural-gas liquids–are booming. The impact is larger than anyone expected.
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For Teens Online, Hundreds of ‘Friends’ and No One to Turn To
Amanda Todd is an Internet sensation. Last week, her name was a trending Twitter #hashtag. A Facebook page honoring her has 590,000 “Likes.” A YouTube message she recorded to the world— “I’m not doing this for attention,” she wrote in an accompanying note, “I’m doing this to be an inspiration and to show that I can be strong”—has been watched more than four million times.
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Emily Witt · Diary: Online Dating
I am not usually comfortable in a bar by myself, but I had been in San Francisco for a week and the apartment I sublet had no chairs in it, just a bed and a couch. My friends in town were married or worked nights. One Tuesday I had lentil soup for supper standing up at the kitchen counter. After I finished, I moved to the couch in the empty living room and sat under the flat overhead light refreshing feeds on my laptop. This was not a way to live. A man would go to a bar alone, I told myself. So I went to a bar alone.
I sat on a stool at the centre of the bar, ordered a beer, and refreshed the feeds on my mobile. I waited for something to happen. A basketball game played on several monitors at once. The bar had red fake leather booths, Christmas lights and a female bartender. A lesbian couple cuddled at one end of it. At the other end, around the corner from where I sat, a bespectacled man my age watched the game. As the only man and the only woman alone at the bar, we looked at each other. Then I pretended to watch the game on a monitor that allowed me to look the other way. He turned his back to me to watch the monitor over the pool tables, where the pool players now applauded some exploit.
I waited to be approached. A few stools down, two men broke into laughter. One came over to show me why they were laughing. He handed me his mobile and pointed to a Facebook post. I read the post and smiled obligingly. The man returned to his seat. I drank my beer.
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Mind: The Science, Art, and Experience of our Inner Lives
screen shot…go to url
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